The Man in the Mirror

I am a terrorist.

I do regular terrorist things. I get up every morning in my terrorist bed in my terrorist apartment. It's a modest place in a three-story late-19th century building with some nods to Art Nouveau here and there, on a tiny street elbowed between facades leaning toward each other almost to touching on either side. I turn on vapid, secular morning television not for the content, but for some distracting noise as I lay out my mat and launch into a brief, invigorating routine of low-impact Pilates, but never yoga. The center I'm looking for is physical, not spiritual. That way lies apostasy.

When I'm in line at the shop downstairs for my regular cafe au lait, I avoid contamination by the Western decadence around me by focusing on my iPad Mini 4 and whatever it offers me in the way of religious retreat. Mostly the football scores. The Anderlecht results are as good a proof as any of God's favor on any given day.

I have become a master of blending in with the infidels. Today it's my woolen navy pea coat, natty corduroy trousers with a hint of a shine to them and bespoke sheepskin boots, constructed to cradle my tricky foot arches. They make sense as you never know when you're going to have to make a break for it. When the train stops a bit short, the woman next to me dribbles a few drops of her chain-brand mocha-something abomination on my jacket sleeve. She immediately goes to the top of the list of the people who must die.

My job is to infiltrate, to abide, to find a time and opportunity to strike fear into the hearts of the mindless agents of waste, pornography and imperial crusader aggression. It's a process I've committed to, choosing the long, slow route for maximum effectiveness. Next month will be fourteen years. I've even been willing to put my immortal soul in peril by pretending to be romantically interested in the morally bankrupt women of many nations who pass through Brussels. My latest coup of subterfuge has been a six-year relationship with Swedish diplomatic interpreter with whom I now live. She's spent the last two years hounding me to get married and well, the joke's on her because I've totally agreed. Not because she threatened to leave, but because now I'll be even deeper undercover as a person who has found happiness and real, lasting love.

I spend every day working information technology and support for a small nonprofit finance company specializing in loans and grants for business owners in the developing world. I've spent many, many nights out with coworkers at restaurants and bars and karaoke, even at weddings and funerals and as godfather to some of their children, never once letting on that eventually I'll have to kill them all as redress for the imbalance of power afflicting my exploited people.

I'm so deep undercover, sometimes I forget that I'm undercover. Once for eleven years in a row. But sometimes news cycles will pop up to remind me about the war between civilizations and the need to draw stark lines between the corrupt, rotting, exploitative, colonial western capitalist-fascists and the purity of my holy cause. But I'm never more horrified than when I see comrades execute acts of violence and mayhem against western targets and then I see leaders of our enemies in immediate response doing exactly what we wanted them to do and I'm forced to think: holy fuck, sometimes this terrorism bullshit actually works.

Meanwhile, I still wait, biding my time. Maybe now is as good a time as any to join in the struggle in a more active way, but there's a lot of heat around at the moment. Plus we've already committed a lot of money to the wedding preparations. The DJ retainer fee, for example, is totally nonrefundable.